Saturday, June 27, 2009

Ouch!


A picture book featuring hedgehogs that is lower on my list of favorites is Ouch! by Ragnhild Scammell, illustrated by Michael Terry. It has cutesy cartoonish illustrations. The main character, Hedgehog, and the goat who solves the problem in the end are pretty charming, but their faces don't convey much expression. Also, the landscape is rather green & fruitful for a time when a hedgehog is going to sleep for the winter. The text and the illustrations match, but the pics don't add any depth or nuance to what's going on in the plainly told story.

The plot is based on the old folk idea that European hedgehogs are able to collect fruit and carry it away impaled on their quills. In Ouch!, an apple falls onto & sticks to little Hedgehog. She wishes to get into her nest to hibernate, but now she can't because she won't fit. Other animals offer advice, but when she tries to scrape the apple off, she always ends up with something more stuck in her quills. It's not particularly believeable, even for a fanciful picture book. The best part is when Hedgehog already has stuff all over her quills (Nuts? Really, you think nuts would stick?) and a small piece of blue paper flies through the air. Little Hedgie runs around to avoid it, but it floats right onto her back & sticks! Some days everything just gets all up in your quills...

An interesting facet of this text is the 26 page length. Most picture books are standard at 32 pages. The original UK publisher, Little Tiger Press, added in black & white activity pages in between the full color spreads. Good Books, the US publisher, has left these out.

An Amazon search shows that Scholastic has picked this text up & published an audiotape along with it, changing the title to Apple Trouble. I wonder why the title change?

No comments:

Post a Comment